“You came back to the tent,”
she began, “and ever since then you have misunderstood
what you saw. For this is the truth: I was
going to kill myself.”
Thresk was startled as he had not
expected to be; and a great wave of relief swept over
him and uplifted his soul. Here was the simplest
explanation, yet it had never occurred to him.
Always he had been besieged by the vision of Stella
standing quietly by the table, deliberately preparing
her rifle for use, always he had linked up that vision
with the death of Stephen Ballantyne in a dreadful
connection. He did not doubt that she spoke the
truth now. Looking at her and noticing the anguish
of her face, he could not doubt it. So definite
a premeditation as he had imagined there had not been,
and relief carried him to pity.
“So it had come to that?” he said.
“Yes,” replied Stella.
“And you had your share in bringing it to that you
who sit in judgment.”
“I!” Thresk exclaimed.
“Yes, you who sit in judgment.
I am not alone. No, I am not alone. A crime
was committed? Then you must shoulder your portion
of the blame.”
Thresk asked himself in vain what
was his share. He had done a cowardly thing years
ago a few miles from this spot. He had never ceased
to reproach himself for the cowardice. But that
it had lived and worked like some secret malady until
in the end it had made him an all-unconscious accomplice
in that midnight tragedy, a sharer in its guilt, if
guilt there were here again was news for
him. But the knowledge which her first words
had given to him, that all these years he had never
got the truth of her, kept him humble now. He
ceased to be judge. He became pupil and as pupil
he answered her.
“I am ready to shoulder it.”
He was seated on a cushioned bench
which stood behind the writing-table and Stella sat
down at his side.
“When we parted that
morning it was in the drawing-room over
there in my cottage. We parted, you to your work
of getting on, Henry, I to think of you getting on
without me at your side. There was a letter lying
on the table, a letter from India. Jane Repton
had written it and she asked me to go out to her for
the cold weather. I went. I was a young girl,
lonely and very unhappy, and as young girls often do
who are lonely and very unhappy I drifted into marriage.”
“I see,” said Thresk in
a hushed voice. The terrible conviction grew upon
him now, lurid as the breaking of a day of storm, that
the cowardice he had shown on Bignor Hill ruined her
altogether and hurt him not at all. “Yes,
I see. There my share begins.”
“Oh no. Not yet,”
she answered. “Then I spoke when I should
have kept silence. I let my heart go out when
I should have guarded it. No, I cannot blame
you.”
“You have the right none the less.”
But Stella would not excuse herself
now and to him by any subtlety or artifice.
“No: I married. That
was my affair. I was beaten despised ridiculed terrified
by a husband who drank secretly and kept all his drunkenness
for me. That, too, was my affair. But I
might have gone on. For seven years it had lasted.
I was settling into a dull habit of misery. I
might have gone on being bullied and tortured had
not one little thing happened to push me over the precipice.”
“And what was that?” asked Thresk.
“Your visit to me at Chitipur,”
she replied, and the words took his breath away.
Why, he had travelled to Chitipur merely to save her.
He leaned forward eagerly but she anticipated him.
She smiled at him with an indulgent forgiveness.
“Oh, why did you come? But I know.”
“Do you?” Thresk asked. Here at all
events she was wrong.
“Yes. You came because
of that one weak soft spot of sentimentalism there
is in all of you, the strongest, the hardest.
You are strong for years. You live alone for
years. Then comes the sentimental moment and it’s
we who suffer, not you.”
And deep in Thresk’s mind was
the terror of the mistakes people make in ignorance
of each other, and of the mortal hurt the mistakes
inflict. He had misread Stella. Here was
she misreading him and misreading him in some strange
way to her peril and ruin.
“You are sure of that?”
he asked. She had no doubt no more
doubt than he had had of the reason why she stood
preparing her rifle.
“Quite,” she answered.
“You had heard of me in Bombay and it came over
you that you would like to see how the woman you had
loved looked after all these years: whether she
retained her pretty way, whether she missed you ah,
above all, whether she missed you. You wanted
to fan up into a mild harmless flame the ashes of
an old romance, warm your hands at it for half an
hour, recapture a savour of dim and pleasant memories
and then go back to your own place and your own work,
untouched and unhurt.”
Thresk laughed aloud with bitterness
at the mistake she had made. Yet he could not
blame her. There was a certain shrewd insight
which though it had led her astray in this case might
well have been true in any other case, might well
have been true of him. He remembered her disbelief
in all that he had said to her in that tent at Chitipur;
and he was appalled by the irony of things and the
blind and feeble helplessness of men to combat it.
“So that’s why I came to Chitipur?”
he cried.
“Yes,” Stella answered
without a second of hesitation. “But I couldn’t
be left untouched and unhurt. You came and all
that I had lost came with you, came in a vivid rush
of bright intolerable memories.” She clasped
her hands over her eyes and Thresk lived over again
that evening in the tent upon the desert, but with
a new understanding. His mind was illumined.
He saw the world as a prison in which each living being
is shut off from his neighbour by the impenetrable
wall of an inability to understand.
“Memories of summers here,”
she resumed, “of women friends, of dainty and
comfortable things, and days of great happiness when
it was good oh so very good! to
be alive and young. And you were going back to
it all, straight by the night-mail to Bombay, straight
from the station on board your ship. Oh, how
it hurt to hear you speak of it, with a casual pleasant
word about exile and next-door neighbours!” She
clasped her hands together in front of her, her fingers
worked and twisted. “No, I couldn’t
endure it,” she whispered. “The blows,
the ridicule, the contempt, I determined, should come
to an end that night, and when you saw me with the
rifle in my hand I was going to end it.”
“Yes?”
“And then the stupidest thing
happened. I couldn’t find the little box
of cartridges.”
Stella described to him how she had
run hither and thither about the tent, opening drawers,
looking into bags and growing more nervous and more
flurried with every second that passed. She had
so little time. Ballantyne was not going as far
as the station with Thresk. He merely intended
to see his visitor off beyond the edge of the camp.
And it must all be over and done with before he came
back. She heard Ballantyne call to Thresk to
sit firm while the camel rose; and still she had not
found them. She heard Thresk’s voice saying
good-night.
“The last words, Henry, I wanted
to hear in the world. I thought that I would
wait for them and the moment they had died away then.
But I hadn’t found the cartridges and so the
search began again.”
Thresk, watching her as she lived
through again those desperate minutes, was carried
back to Chitipur and seemed to be looking into that
tent. He had a dreadful picture before his eyes
of a hunted woman rushing wildly from table to table,
with a white, quivering face and lips which babbled
incoherently and feverish hands which darted out nervously,
over-setting books and ornaments in a vain
search for a box of cartridges wherewith to kill herself.
She found them at last behind the whisky bottle, and
clutched at them with a great sigh of relief.
She carried them over to the table on which she had
laid her rifle, and as she pushed one into the breech,
Stephen Ballantyne stood in the doorway of the tent.
“He swore at me,” Stella
continued. “I had taken the necklace off.
I had shown you the bruises on my throat. He
cursed me for it, and he asked me roughly why I didn’t
shoot myself and rid him of a fool. I stood without
answering him. That always maddened him.
I didn’t do it on purpose. I had become
dull and slow. I just stood and looked at him
stupidly, and in a fury he ran at me with his fist
raised. I recoiled, he frightened me, and then
before he reached me yes.” Her
voice died away in a whisper. Thresk did not
interrupt. There was more for her to tell and
one dreadful incident to explain. Stella went
on in a moment, looking straight in front of her and
with all the passion of fear gone from her voice.
“I remember that he stood and
stared at me foolishly for a little while. I
had time to believe that nothing had happened, and
to be glad that nothing had happened and to be terrified
of what he would do to me. And then he fell and
lay quite still.”
It seemed that she had no more to
say, that she meant to leave unexplained the inexplicable
thing; and even Thresk put it out of his thoughts.
“It was an accident then,”
he cried. “After all, Stella, it was an
accident.”
But Stella sat mutely at his side.
Some struggle was taking place in her and was reflected
in her countenance. Thresk’s eager joy was
damped.
“No, my friend,” she said
at length, slowly and very deliberately. “It
was not an accident.”
“But you fired in fear.”
Thresk caught now at that alternative. “You
shot in self-defence. Stella, I blundered at
Bombay.” He moved away from her in his
agitation. “I am sorry. Oh, I am very
sorry. I should never have come forward at all.
I should have lain quiet and let your counsel develop
his case, as he was doing, on the line of self-defence.
You would have been acquitted and rightly
acquitted. You would have had the sympathy of
every one. But I didn’t know your story.
I was afraid that the discovery of Ballantyne outside
the tent would ruin you. I knew that my story
could not fail to save you. So I told it.
But I was wrong, Stella. I blundered. I
did you a great harm.”
He was standing before her now and
so poignant an anguish rang in his voice that Stella
was moved by it to discard her plans. Thus she
had meant to tell the story if ever she was driven
to it. Thus she had told it. But now she
put out a timid hand and took him by the arm.
“I said I would tell you the
truth. But I have not told it all. It’s
so hard not to keep one little last thing back.
Listen to me”; and with a bowed head and her
hand still clinging desperately to his arm she made
the final revelation.
“It’s true I was crazy
with fear. But there was just one little moment
when I knew what I was going to do, when it came upon
me that the way I had chosen before was the wrong
one, and this new way the right one. No, no,”
she cried as Thresk moved. “Even that’s
not all. That moment you could hardly
measure it in time, yet to me it was distinct enough
and is marked distinctly in my memories, for during
it he drew back.”
“What?” cried Thresk. “Don’t
say it, Stella!”
“Yes,” she answered.
“During it he drew back, knowing what I was going
to do just as I suddenly knew it. It was a moment
when he seemed to me to bleat yes, that’s
the word to bleat for mercy.”
She had told the truth now and she
dropped her hand from his sleeve.
“And you? What did you do?” asked
Thresk.
“I? Oh, I went mad, I think.
When I saw him lying there I lost my head. The
tent was flecked with great spots of fire which whirled
in front of my eyes and hurt. A strength far
greater than mine possessed me. I was crazy.
I dragged him out of the tent for no reason that’s
the truth for no reason at all. Can
you believe that?”
“Yes,” replied Thresk
readily enough. “I can well believe that.”
“Then something broke,”
she resumed. “I felt weak and numbed.
I dragged myself to my room. I went to bed.
Does that sound very horrible to you? I had one
clear thought only. It was over. It was all
over. I slept.” She leaned back in
her chair, her hands dropped to her side, her eyes
closed. “Yes I did actually sleep.”
A clock ticking upon the mantelshelf
seemed to grow louder and louder in the silence of
the library. The sound of it forced itself upon
Thresk. It roused Stella. She opened her
eyes. In front of her Thresk was standing, his
face grave and very pitiful.
“Now answer me truly,”
said Stella, and leaning forward she fixed her eyes
upon him. “If you still loved me, would
you, knowing this story, refuse to marry me?”
Thresk looked back across the years
of her unhappy life and saw her as the sport of a
malicious destiny.
“No,” he said, “I should not.”
“Then why shouldn’t Dick marry me?”
“Because he doesn’t know this story.”
Stella nodded her head.
“Yes. There’s the
flaw in my appeal to you, I know. You are quite
right. I should have told him. I should
tell him now,” and suddenly she dropped on her
knees before Thresk, the tears burst from her eyes,
and in a voice broken with passion she cried:
“But I daren’t not
yet. I have tried to oh, more than
once. Believe that, Henry! You must believe
it! But I couldn’t. I hadn’t
the courage. You will give me a little time,
won’t you? Oh, not long. I will tell
him of my own free will very soon, Henry.
But not now not now.”
The sound of her sobbing and the sight
of her distress wrung Thresk’s heart. He
lifted her from the ground and held her.
“There’s another way, Stella,” he
said gently.
“Oh, I know,” she answered.
She was thinking of the little bottle with the tablets
of véronal which stood by her bed, not for the
first time that night. She did not stop to consider
whether Thresk, too, had that way in his mind.
It came to her so naturally; it was so easy, so simple
a way. She never thought that she misunderstood.
She had come to the end of the struggle; the battle
had gone against her; she recognised it; and now,
without complaint, she bowed her head for the final
blow. The inherited habit of submission taught
her that the moment had come for compliance and gave
her the dignity of patience. “Yes, I suppose
that I must take that way,” she said, and she
walked towards the chair over which she had thrown
her wrap. “Good-night, Henry.”
But before she had thrown the cloak
about her shoulders Thresk stood between her and the
window. He took the cloak from her hands.
“There have been too many mistakes,
Stella, between you and me. There must be no
more. Here are we until to-night strangers,
and because we were strangers, and never knew it,
spoiling each other’s lives.”
Stella looked at him in bewilderment.
She had taught Thresk that night unimagined truths
about herself. She was now to learn something
of the inner secret man which the outward trappings
of success concealed. He led her to a sofa and
placed her at his side.
“You have said a good many hard
things to me, Stella,” he said with a smile “most
of them true, but some untrue. And the untrue
things you wouldn’t have said if you had ever
chanced to ask yourself one question: why I really
missed my steamer at Bombay.”
Stella Ballantyne was startled.
She made a guess but faltered in the utterance of
it, so ill it fitted with her estimate of him.
“You missed it on purpose?”
“Yes. I didn’t come
to Chitipur on any sentimental journey”; and
he told how he had seen her portrait in Jane Repton’s
drawing-room and learnt of the misery of her marriage.
“I came to fetch you away.”
And again Stella stared at him.
“You? You pitied me so much? Oh, Henry!”
“No. I wanted you so much.
It’s quite true that I sacrificed everything
for success. I don’t deny that it is well
worth having. But Jane Repton said something
to me in Bombay so true you can get whatever
you want if you want it enough, but you cannot control
the price you will have to pay. I know, my dear,
that I paid too big a price. I trampled down
something better worth having.”
Stella rose suddenly to her feet.
“Oh, if I had known that on
the night in Chitipur! What a difference it would
have made!” She turned swiftly to him. “Couldn’t
you have told me?”
“I hadn’t a chance.
I hadn’t five minutes with you alone. And
you wouldn’t have believed me if I had had the
chance. I left my pipe behind me in order to
come back and tell you. I had only the time then
to tell you that I would write.”
“Yes, yes,” she answered,
and again the cry burst from her: “What
a difference it would have made! Merely to have
known that you really wanted me!”
She would never have taken that rifle
from the corner and searched for the cartridges, that
she might kill herself! Whether she had consented
or not to go away and ruin Thresk’s future she
would have had a little faith wherewith to go on and
face the world. If she had only known! But
up on the top of Bignor Hill a blow had been struck
under which her faith had reeled and it had never
had a chance of recovery. She laughed harshly.
The heart of her tragedy was now revealed to her.
She saw herself the sport of gods who sat about like
cruel louts torturing a helpless animal and laughing
stupidly at its sufferings. She turned again to
Thresk and held out her hand.
“Thank you. You would have ruined yourself
for me.”
“Ruin’s a large word,”
he answered, and still holding her hand he drew her
down again. She yielded reluctantly. She
might misread his character, but when the feelings
and emotions were aroused she had the unerring insight
of her sex. She was warned by it now. She
looked at Thresk with startled eyes.
“Why have you told me all this?”
she asked in suspense, ready for flight.
“I want to prepare you.
There’s a way out of the trouble the
honest way for both of us: to make a clean breast
of it together and together take what follows.”
She was on her feet and away from him in a second.
“No, no,” she cried in alarm, and Thresk
mistook the cause of the alarm.
“You can’t be tried again, Stella.
That’s over. You have been acquitted.”
She temporised.
“But you?”
“I?” and he shrugged his
shoulders. “I take the consequences.
I doubt if they would be so very heavy. There
would be some sympathy. And afterwards it
would be as though you had slipped down from Chitipur
to Bombay and joined me as I had planned. We
can make the best of our lives together.”
There was so much sincerity in his
manner, so much simplicity she could not doubt him;
and the immensity of the sacrifice he was prepared
to make overwhelmed her. It was not merely scandal
and the Divorce Court which he was ready to brave
now. He had gone beyond the plan contemplated
at Bombay. He was willing to go hand in hand
with her into the outer darkness, laying down all
that he had laboured for unsparingly.
“You would do that for me?”
she said. “Oh, you put me to shame!”
and she covered her face with her hands.
“You give up your struggle for
a footing in the world that’s what
you want, isn’t it?” He pleaded, and she
drew her hands away from her face. He believed
that? He imagined that she was fighting just for
a name, a position in the world? She stared at
him in amazement, and forced herself to understand.
Since he himself had cared for her enough to remain
unmarried, since the knowledge of the mistake which
he had made had grown more bitter with each year,
he had fallen easily into that other error that she
had never ceased to care too.
“We’ll make something
of our lives, never fear,” he was saying.
“But to marry this man for his position, and
he not knowing oh, my dear, I know how
you are driven but it won’t do!
It won’t do!”
She stood in silence for a little
while. One by one he had torn her defences down.
She could hardly bear the gentleness upon his face
and she turned away from him and sat down upon a chair
a little way off.
“Stand there, Henry,”
she said. A strange composure had succeeded her
agitation. “I must tell you something more
which I had meant to hide from you the
last thing which I have kept back. It will hurt
you, I am afraid.”
There came a change upon Thresk’s
face. He was steeling himself to meet a blow.
“Go on.”
“It isn’t because of his
position that I cling to Dick. I want him to
keep that yes for his sake.
I don’t want him to lose more by marrying me
than he needs must”; and comprehension burst
upon Henry Thresk.
“You care for him then! You really care
for him?”
“So much,” she answered,
“that if I lost him now I should lose all the
world. You and I can’t go back to where
we stood nine years ago. You had your chance
then, Henry, if you had wished to take it. But
you didn’t wish it, and that sort of chance
doesn’t often come again. Others like it yes.
But not quite the same one. I am sorry. But
you must believe me. If I lost Dick I should
lose all the world.”
So far she had spoken very deliberately,
but now her voice faltered.
“That is my one poor excuse.”
The unexpected word roused Thresk to inquiry.
“Excuse?” he asked, and
with her eyes fixed in fear upon him she continued:
“Yes. I meant Dick to marry
me publicly. But I saw that his father shrank
from the marriage. I grew afraid. I told
Dick of my fears. He banished them. I let
him banish them.”
“What do you mean?” Thresk asked.
“We were married privately in London five days
ago.”
Thresk uttered a low cry and in a
moment Stella was at his side, all her composure gone.
“Oh, I know that it was wrong.
But I was being hunted. They were all like a
pack of wolves after me. Mr. Hazlewood had joined
them. I was driven into a corner. I loved
Dick. They meant to tear him from me without any
pity. I clung. Yes, I clung.”
But Thresk thrust her aside.
“You tricked him,” he cried.
“I didn’t dare to tell
him,” Stella pleaded, wringing her hands.
“I didn’t dare to lose him.”
“You tricked him,” Thresk
repeated; and at the note of anger in his voice Stella
found herself again.
“You accuse and condemn me?” she asked
quietly.
“Yes. A thousand times,
yes,” he exclaimed hotly, and she answered with
another question winged on a note of irony:
“Because I tricked him? Or because I married
him?”
Thresk was silenced. He recognised
the truth implied in the distinction, he turned to
her with a smile.
“Yes,” he answered.
“You are right, Stella. It’s because
you married him.”
He stood for a moment in thought.
Then with a gesture of helplessness he picked up her
cloak. She watched his action and as he came towards
her she cried:
“But I’ll tell him now,
Henry.” In a way she owed it to this man
who cared for her so much, who was so prepared for
sacrifice, if sacrifice could help. That morning
on the downs was swept from her memory now. “Yes,
I’ll tell him now,” she said eagerly.
Since Henry Thresk set such store upon that confession,
why so very likely would Dick, her husband, too.
But Thresk shook his head.
“What’s the use now?
You give him no chance. You can’t set him
free”; and Stella was as one turned to stone.
All argument seemed sooner or later to turn to that
one dread alternative which had already twice that
night forced itself on her acceptance.
“Yes, I can, Henry, and I will,
I promise you, if he wishes to be free. I can
do it quite easily, quite naturally. Any woman
could. So many of us take things to make us sleep.”
There was no boastfulness in her voice
or manner, but rather a despairing recognition of
facts.
“Good God, you mustn’t
think of it!” said Thresk eagerly. “That’s
too big a price to pay.”
Stella shook her head wistfully.
“You hear it said, Henry,”
she answered with an indescribable wistfulness, “that
women will do anything to keep the men they love.
They’ll do a great deal I am an example but
not always everything. Sometimes love runs just
a little stronger. And then it craves that the
loved one shall get all he wants to have. If Dick
wants his freedom I too, then, shall want him to have
it.”
And while Thresk stood with no words
to answer her there came a knocking upon the door.
It was gentle, almost furtive, but it startled them
both like a clap of thunder. For a moment they
stood rigid. Then Thresk silently handed Stella
her cloak and pointed towards the window. He
began to speak aloud. A word or two revealed his
plan to Stella Ballantyne. He was rehearsing
a speech which he was to make in the Courts before
a jury. But the handle of the door rattled and
now old Mr. Hazlewood’s voice was heard.
“Thresk! Are you there?”
Once more Thresk pointed to the window. But Stella
did not move.
“Let him in,” she said
quietly, and with a glance at her he unlocked the
door.
Mr. Hazlewood stood outside.
He had not gone to bed that night. He had taken
off his coat and now wore a smoking-jacket.
“I knew that I should not sleep
to-night, so I sat up,” he began, “and
I thought that I heard voices here.”
Over Thresk’s shoulder he saw
Stella Ballantyne standing erect in the middle of
the room, her shining gown the one bright patch of
colour. “You here?” he cried to her,
and Thresk made way for him to enter. He advanced
to her with a look of triumph in his eyes.
“You here at this
house with Thresk? You were persuading
him to continue to hold his tongue.”
Stella met his gaze steadily.
“No,” she replied.
“He was persuading me to the truth, and he has
succeeded.”
Mr. Hazlewood smiled and nodded.
There was no magnanimity in his triumph. A schoolboy
would have shown more chivalry to the opponent who
was down.
“You confess then? Good! Richard must
be told.”
“Yes,” answered Stella. “I
claim the right to tell him.”
But Mr. Hazlewood scoffed at the proposal.
“Oh dear no!” he cried.
“I refuse the claim. I shall go straight
to Richard now.”
He had actually taken a couple of
steps towards the door before Stella’s voice
rang out suddenly loud and imperative.
“Take care, Mr. Hazlewood.
After you have told him he will come to me. Take
care!”
Hazlewood stopped. Certainly that was true.
“I’ll tell Dick to-morrow,
here, in your presence,” she said. “And
if he wishes it I’ll set him free and never
trouble either of you again.”
Hazlewood looked at Thresk and was
persuaded to consent. Reflection showed him that
it was the better plan. He himself would be present
when Stella spoke. He would see that the truth
was told without embroidery.
“Very well, to-morrow,” he said.
Stella flung the cloak over her shoulders
and went up to the window. Thresk opened it for
her.
“I’ll see you to your door,” he
said.
The moon had risen now. It hung
low with the branches of a tree like a lattice across
its face; and on the garden and the meadow lay that
unearthly light which falls when a moonlit night begins
to drown in the onrush of the dawn.
“No,” she said. “I
would rather go alone. But do something for me,
will you? Stay to-morrow. Be here when I
tell him.” She choked down a sob.
“Oh, I shall want a friend and you are so kind.”
“So kind!” he repeated
with a note of bitterness. Could there be praise
from a woman’s lips more deadly? You are
kind; you are put in your place in the ruck of men;
you are extinguished.
“Oh yes, I’ll stay.”
She stood for a moment on the stone flags outside
the window.
“Will he forgive?” she
asked. “You would. And he is not so
very young, is he? It’s the young who don’t
forgive. Good-night.”
She went along the path and across
the meadow. Thresk watched her go and saw the
light spring up in her room. Then he closed the
window and drew the curtain. Mr. Hazlewood had
gone. Thresk wondered what the morrow would bring.
After all, Stella was right. Youth was a graceful
thing of high-sounding words and impetuous thoughts,
but like many other graceful things it could be hard
and cruel. Its generosity did not come from any
wide outlook on a world where there is a good deal
to be said for everything. It was rather a matter
of physical health than judgment. Yes, he was
glad Dick Hazlewood was half his way through the thirties.
For himself well, he knew his business.
It was to be kind. He turned off the lights and
went to bed.